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MeIn Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Bande à Part, young celebrities walk through the Louvre, leaving art lovers and angry guards in their wake. It seems chaotic and confusing and yet Godard’s camera finds time to pause before Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, a picture of the French Revolution. This is 1960s Paris, a place where extreme youth mocks high culture in a game that starts with running in a museum and will end 68 in the streets.
Julio Le Parc’s review of Tate Modern it immerses you in 1960s Paris and it’s loud fun. It took a lot to get rid of my imaginary pillar and “connect” with art but soon I was pushing buttons and drawing circles. Marcel Duchamp called one of his late works Prière de Toucher (Please Touch), which would have made a good title for this exhibition. Please grab this piece of art, make it do things, let it do things for you. One of the simplest, the Model of Control, is a black and white drawing album: a red arrow on the wall tells you the way around and the faster you do it, the black and white becomes white.
Not so subtle, but maybe Le Parc is avant garde a different group he was part of a group of seven called GRAV (Group la Recherche d’Art Visuel), he was secretly ill. Le Parc, who was born in Argentina in 1928 and died on 30 May this year, said that when he moved to Paris in 1958 he was oppressed by the silence and death of his museums and buildings. GRAV wanted to fill them with noise and action, disrupting high culture and democratic sports. They saw this as an act of change, the liberation of everyone’s true wisdom. Like running through the Louvre.
It’s as if Bridget Riley got tired of creating her mind-bending art and decided to open up the fun. In the late 1950s, Le Parc experimented with geometric designs that looked old fashioned in the modern world until you started to see them moving and shiny. Visions accumulate and then disappear before, or within, your eyes. It’s the same principle as Riley’s Op Art, which makes you question your own thoughts and see that our true thoughts are fragile illusions.
But such brain games were not mature enough for GRAV. They also wanted to touch the person they saw. In Le Parc’s 1966 Screen with Reflective Blades, a red screen is hung, corner up, behind a series of transparent mirrors so that every change your body makes changes the film continuously, an ophthalmoscopic fantasy. Ensemble of Eleven Surprise Elements from 1967 is pure joy. You stand in front of shelves and display rooms of random things: bicycle spokes, a simple belt, geometric cutouts, rocking plates. Then you press buttons to make each object judge or vibrate with a joke, a babble, a loud noise. Is it art? If so, art is a big joke. Have fun, says Le Parc, laugh and play!
However he is an amazing artist. His desperate and flamboyant performances seem like they belong in the 1960s, but he also manages to create a transcendent beauty. The button I pressed frequently revealed what appeared to be unopened toilet rolls falling in rows from the wall across the building. Without moving, it could be a picture hanging on the wall by the American sculptor Robert Morris, but change it and a giant is blowing the ropes in your face and you seem to be standing in front of this huge animal whose tentacles, lit from the ground, create beautiful shadows on the ceiling.
He performs miracles in the light, creating impossible dream places. Of course they are not miracles. In Continuous Light and Four Forms in Contortion you can clearly see, as intended, how the curved, shiny metal moves around like waves between two lamps to direct the light in expansion and contraction, surprising yet economical. Le Parc was a pioneer of the kind of beautiful scenery that is so easy to create today with so many amazing technological tools. I started to feel a little tired of his last project Blue Sphere, a huge planet full of rooms with blue ropes hanging from the lights that create glowing patterns on the walls. If it was a painting, you’d call it easy on the eyes.
That’s the problem with art. It can change the world, as Le Parc and his colleagues at GRAV did, but it ends up being fun. This is a very interesting show but the changes are lost in the analysis. It makes you think of an artistic manifesto that is the opposite of anger: Matisse’s famous statement that he wanted his work to be “a calming influence, a calming influence, something like a good chair”. There is nothing wrong with that. Julio Le Parc wanted to change the world but instead he created a new type of furniture.
